Demonetisation and cashless push is inspiring both public and private entities to take some big, bold and crucial steps to encourage digital transactions and to ease the inconvenience of lack of currency notes in circulation. Now, to make it easier for general public to make smaller payments, Government has done away with One Time Password (OTP)Â authentication required for online transactions amounting to less than Rs. 2000.
No OTP For Sub-Rs 2000 Online Transactions
In a major relief for cashless shoppers, Reserve Bank of India has removed the two-step authentication protocol for sub-Rs 2000 transactions. This means, that from now, all digital transactions below Rs 2000 can be done without any need of OTP.
Currently, when you make a transaction, and after you have given the card details on the merchant website, you need to enter an OTP that is sent to your registered mobile number before the transaction gets through. However, going forward that will not be the case. Going forward, customers will go through a one-time registration process with Visa Checkout and Mastercard’s Masterpass, requiring entry of card details and additional factor authentication by the issuing bank.
Once the one-time-registration is done, card details entered by the customer will act as the first-factor authentication, while network provided password will serve as 2nd factor authentication!
In this new scenario, the payment network (Visa/MasterCard/RuPay) itself authenticates the transaction, and hence customer can complete the transaction without leaving the merchant’s website.
Last year, RBI had also removed the requirement of OTP for those sub-Rs 2000 transactions which were conducted using NFC technology.
Removal of the requirement for OTP for low value transactions will save a lot of time, and remove the hassles for the digital citizen. Besides, this also good news for payment processing and card payment companies like Visa and MasterCard and Govt. backed RuPay users, as now they can easily pay for cab rides, online shopping and more without encountering the hassles of OTP for below Rs 2000 transactions.
Amit Jain, president, Uber India, said, “This waiver is a big leap in the right direction to bring ease and convenience to the use of cards over cash and will strengthen the foundation for India to become a leading digital economy.”
While Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma said, “It will increase consumer convenience so that they use cards more often. A larger number of users will be able to do digital transactions after this.”
As per experts, this move will also bring down failure rates among low value online transactions.
